indessed roscivs

I program in Java for a living. I love the language. I like how it’s statically typed, I like how it has libraries for everything, I like how Sun is cross-licensing it under the GPL. The JVM load times are getting better, and as Java applications become more and more common the JVM load time and memory overhead will become less and less important. The UI toolkits are getting better and better, Linux and OS X are increasingly integrating Java with their core UIs, and Java Web Start is becoming a great way of delivering applications.

But I hate Java applets. I can’t stand them. And I think they are the #1 source of misconceptions about Java in general, and the source of most of the worst pet peeves about Java applications.

First of all, they’re slow. Java has a reputation of being slow in general, and I think this is a big reason why. When I visit a web page containing a Java applet, my browser instantly freezes. It remains frozen for several seconds, sometimes as many as thirty. Then I’ll get an empty grey box while the applet loads. This grey box may last anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes, depending on the size and complexity of the applet, and nowhere am I given a sign of how long it will take.

Compare this with Flash. When I visit a page with a Flash plugin, there is a slight slow-down for the plugin to load, but the browser is typically responsive again within a second. I’m not sure if this is because Flash spins off another thread to do the heavy lifting, or delays loading all of the framework until the swf is downloaded, but the Java plugin could easily do the same. Then, the Flash swf typically begins to play some sort of “loading” image immediately, giving me an idea of how long it will take to load. This would be trickier for Java to do, but with some work (perhaps a limited UI library and a class that is loaded first) it would definitely be achievable.

The second big reason I hate Java applets is because they’re ugly. This is mostly a problem of AWT, the default UI toolkit for applets, and by far the ugliest. But even when applets are written using Swing (which is rare), there is hardly any native UI integration. It still looks, painfully so, like Java.

Unfortunately, because of the early problems with applets, Sun has all but abandoned the idea of Java as a web platform. The main use of Java these days is on the back-end, as part of complex frameworks which generate applications built on dynamic HTML. As Java has matured (and other big players like IBM’s SWT have appeared on the scene), desktop applications are becoming more common. But it’s lamentable to see these correctable issues go years and years without being sufficiently addressed.

It would take some heavy work (and a lot of PR to overcome the current poor image), but Java could be a viable contender with Macromedia’s Flash. Many of the things that Flash is currently popular for could be done just as well or better in Java, if only these plugin weaknesses were corrected. Flash would once again be relegated to the role of cutesy cartoons and animations, with Java finally able to excel in what it was originally designed for.

“We’re running out of time. We need to get money flowing from consumers and get them used to paying for music again.”
—Ted Cohen, managing director of a music consulting firm[1]

DRM, or “Digital Rights Management,” is a scheme for controlling what can be done with digital content. (I like the phrase, “DRM manages rights the same way that prison manages freedom.”) The basic idea is this: if I’m a musician (or an artist in a similar medium), I would like to be able to sell my music in a digital format. Digital formats are easy and cheap to distribute and to duplicate. The problem is that digital formats are easy and cheap to duplicate—so why would people buy music from me, when it’s just as easy and cheap to get a copy from someone else?

DRM is an attempt to stop this from happening—to make the content easy and cheap for me to duplicate, but difficult and costly for others to duplicate. Unfortunately, this is not a simple task. The tactic taken most often is to use strong encryption to scramble the data. The problem is that you also want the end-user to be able to unscramble the data as well—which means they need the secret encryption key. This renders the encryption nearly worthless. Bruce Schneier, an eminent cryptologist, had this to say about the problem:

It’s not so much about what people can do, it’s more about how they think. There’s nothing anyone can do; trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into account, the sooner people will start making money again.

So far, people haven’t been very quick to accept this. At the Digital Music Forum where Ted Cohen spoke, all panel members save one believe that some form of DRM is necessary. Also at this forum was a considerable amount of Steve Jobs bashing.

Those of you who read my post about Amoroso, Jobs, and DRM know that Steve Jobs (Apple’s CEO) recently spoke out against DRM as something that “hasn’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy.” Furthermore, Steve Jobs stated inequivocally that, “if the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store.”

This caused quite a stir, namely because iTunes has been hailed as one of the few successful uses of DRM. Millions of music files with Apple DRM have been sold. Even more interesting, the Apple DRM is engineered in such a way that songs sold on iTunes can only be played on Apple software—iTunes or iPods. The songs do not work with any third-party software or music players. After a person has amassed a collection of iTunes-purchased songs, they are stuck with Apple and iPod. If they want to switch to a different music player, they have to abandon all the music they purchased. Why would Steve Jobs, after creating such a successful music store, voluntarily give up this lock-in power?

One reason is that he may not really have a choice. The EU and other governments are taking a look at the power wielded by Apple’s DRM and have begun to demand that Apple open up their DRM to other companies, allowing other music companies to sell Apple DRM-protected music that will play on the iPod, as well as allowing competing music players to play Apple DRM-protected tunes. Many, including those at the aforementioned conference, have accused Steve Jobs of being “insincere,” calling his open letter a “red herring.” They believe that Jobs knows that the music companies will never allow him to sell music without DRM protection, and is simply bluffing to get the EU off his back. Steve would never sell music without DRM, they maintain. This is just a PR move—Apple needs DRM to keep people on iTunes and the iPod.

What do I think? Well, first of all I don’t believe that Steve Jobs does anything that isn’t about PR. Steve is first of all a showman, and very good at what he does. But simply because this is good PR doesn’t mean that it’s just lip service. I think Jobs really believes that a world without DRM on music would be better for everyone, and his open letter does a persuasive job of arguing his point.

With DRM, Apple gets a big share of the digital music pie. Without DRM, Apple gets a slightly smaller share of a much bigger pie. All the people who don’t want to buy DRM-encumbered music (either because of ideology, or because they have an mp3 player in their car or a non-iPod model that doesn’t work with Apple’s DRM) are suddenly now in the market. A good portion of them will likely be shopping at the iTunes Music Store.

The real losers here are the music industry, who have backed themselves into a corner and have no easy way out. I like this way of putting it:

Music Industry: We want DRM.
Steve Jobs: You got it. Hey, it only works with iPods as well. Isn’t product tying great!
Music Industry: Can we have more control over our product?
Steve Jobs: Nope.
Music Industry: Oh. Uhm … we’ll leave.
Steve Jobs: No, you won’t.
Music Industry: Oh. Uhm … can you open up Apple’s DRM? This will mean there’s some competition and we can afford to ditch you.
Steve Jobs: Nope. Why would I ever do that?
Music Industry: We’ll make you look like the bad guy.
Steve Jobs: You can try. I made downloadable music viable, produce the gadgets all the cool kids want and I don’t sue children and old ladies. Not only that, but I can plausibly blame all your troubles on you.

The most disingenous statements are coming from the music industry. The best example is from the above article:

Apple has maintained a stranglehold on the digital music industry by locking up iTunes music with DRM.

The music industry is the one with a strangehold on the digital music industry. They can choose who they sell digital music to and under what conditions. There’s nothing stopping them from allowing other music stores to sell music with their own DRM (which they do) that works only on their own music players (which nobody buys because iPods are so popular). In fact, there’s nothing stopping them from allowing other music stores to sell music with no DRM at all, which will work perfectly on every iPod and every other type of music player. They could end Apple’s so-called “strangehold” tomorrow if they really wanted to.

The fact of the matter is that the music industry wants to have its cake and eat it too. They want DRM, but they want DRM that benefits only them, not their resellers. Hopefully, they’ll end up having neither.

One of my coworkers today (who knows I play Go) mentioned to me that he saw an article on digg stating that there had been some new breakthrough in Go-playing computer technology, bringing computers much closer to professional-level play. He couldn’t remember any details of the article, but with a bit of digging (no pun intended), I managed to locate the article he had read.

Two Hungarian scientists have come up with an algorithm that helps computers pick the right move in Go, played by millions around the world, in which players must capture spaces by placing black-and-white marbles on a board in turn.

“We are not far from reaching the level of a professional Go player,” Levente Kocsis of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences computing lab Sztaki said.

I happen to be subscribed to a computer Go mailing list, where researchers from around the world discuss the current state-of-the-art in artificial intelligence with relation to the Go world. Unfortunately, I hadn’t been following along recently, so I hadn’t seen the article before my coworker pointed it out to me. Intrigued, I wondered if there really was some cool new algorithm that had been discovered, or if it was simply another incremental step in the quest to get halfway-decent Go-playing computer programs.Sure enough, when I got home and started pawing through the mailing list archives, one of the first posts was lamenting how the article had completely butchered Kocsis’ quote. From a Yahoo article on the same subject:

“On a nine by nine board we are not far from reaching the level of a professional Go player,” said Levente Kocsis at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ computing lab SZTAKI.

Aha! This is a considerably different statement. Go is played on a 19×19 board. Beginners will often start with a 9×9 board, and then move up to a 13×13 board, before playing on the full-size board. But 9×9 Go, while structurally the same game, is considerably less deep and considerably easier for a computer to process. How much easier?

Well, 6×6 Go is completely solved—or, in other words, computers have calculated the exact sequences of moves that will result in the highest score possible. 7×7 Go has allegedly been solved within the past few years, but nobody (to my knowledge) has exhaustively proven that the sequences they discovered are, in fact, the optimal lines of play.

9×9 Go is only slightly larger than 7×7 Go, but it is so exponentially more difficult that professional Go players routinely trounce the world’s best 9×9 Go programs. As Kocsis’ quote says, we haven’t yet reached the point where computers play 9×9 Go at a professional level. We may be getting close (mostly, in my opinion, due to faster computers—not any special new algorithms), but we haven’t reached it yet.

13×13 is even further from 9×9 than 9×9 is from 7×7. And, predictably, computers do exponentially worse at 13×13, getting crushed by strong amateur players. By the time you get all the way up to 19×19, the world’s best computers are still only about my level. New algorithms or no, we still have a long way to go before Go-playing computer programs are even interesting to watch, much less solid opponents for the world’s best amateurs.

At the end of last Thursday’s post, I ended with the statement, “[Hollywood fakery is] not going to change, but hopefully our awareness of it will.”

I was referring to much more with that comment than simply digital doctoring of movies. Every single image we’re presented with—television, magazines, movies, billboards—has been retouched, altered, and manipulated so much as to be almost unrecognizable as the original. The benefit I think we have over yesteryear, when camera tricks and make-up were the primary methods of making things appear as something they aren’t, is that we can be aware of the fact that what we’re seeing is fake. The human images we’re seeing have been altered so much as to appear drastically closer to some non-existent ideal of perfection than the original flawed human that they (and each of us) are.

But mere rational knowledge of the trickery, unfortunately, doesn’t help our human brains much. When we see a cute girl walking down the street, we still subconsciously compare her with the non-existent façade we see the Hollywood stars present. When we look at ourselves in the mirror, we think that—if only we were to work out a little more, or stop eating a certain thing—we really could look like that. The blessing of the Internet age is that we no longer have to be content with mere rational knowledge; we can see first-hand the extent of the subterfuge.

Take, for example, a typical retouching portfolio. This is the image we see in the media. This is what the person really looks like. (Well, it’s what she looks like with makeup, posing, and camera angles already in play. Seeing her walking down the street would take it yet another step closer to reality.) As you click through the images in the portfolio, some of the changes are more subtle, but every single one of them is an image burned into your mind forever of the power of the digital airbrush.

I could write for another dozen paragraphs details of how exactly the manipulation is done, detailing the tricks and techniques of the field, but no amount of words and rationally understanding how and why it’s done will affect you as much as seeing, exactly, how beauty is made:

In Thursday’s post about digital doctoring of movies, I said, “art is not art because it is rare, or because it is difficult to create”. I’d like to expand on this idea, using a quote from Cliff Stoll’s book, Silicon Snake Oil, as a jumping-off point.

… look at the corrosive effect on our creative community. We reward designers rather than illustrators. Magazines, for instance, have become playgrounds for fonts, photomontages, and color bleeds. These are easy to generate on any computer. Drawings and hand-shaded cartoons, well, they’re more challenging. So we find our literature littered with giant letters and italicized pullout quotes, but few illustrations or cartoons.

It seems that in the artistic world, the means is more and more being mistaken for the ends. ‘If art is easy to do,’ it is argued, ‘it ceases to be art.’ Likewise the reverse is often asserted–that because something is more difficult, it must be more high quality. Thus the use of computers is almost seen as “cheating”.

We must look first at the question: what is art? What do we find good, what is high quality, and what is not? To over-simplify things quite a bit, art is good because it touches our minds in a particular way which we enjoy. This idea of “art is good because it is rare” is absolute junk. “Flashing fifty great works of art across my monitor in two minutes cheapens the work. A part of the value of art is its rarity.” (p. 85) Utter nonsense. The cheapening, if at all, comes either from the lack of fidelity in reproduction, or your failure to take the time you would have taken in a museum to appreciate them. The former has nothing to do with its rarity, and for the latter you have no one to blame but yourself.

I’ve worked in design studios before, and just because some things are “easy to generate on any computer” does not automatically mean they are easy to do well. The Sunday comics are filled with painstakingly hand-drawn illustrations and cartoons, and yet many of them are pathetically uncreative and blasé. Imagine a way one could automatically generate cartoons on the computer, to instantly take them from mind to page without this painstaking process, while the end result was identical to the hand-drawn variety. Would these cartoons be any less works of art?

What is certain is that, with the ease of creating them, many more people would try their hand at cartoons. Predictably, the vast majority of them would be junk. But this doesn’t make the ones that truly were artistic pieces any less superior. The same thing has happened with the introduction of computers in the artistic world. Clip-art, fonts, and layout programs are all relatively easy to use. Predictably, the vast majority of new people trying out these tools produce nothing but junk. But the true artists are still producing quality output, and are thankful for the ease and new features which computers provide.

All that the relative infrequency of illustrations and cartoons when compared with fonts and photomontages tells us is that they are indeed more challenging and time-consuming to create. It tells us nothing of their artistic worth. Would a hand-lettered and hand-illustrated magazine, in which every letter in every sentence was meticulously traced, and every picture hand-drawn, be somehow magically “more artistic” than the identical computer mass-produced version? The quality would depend on the content–the quality of the prose, the quality of the fonts, the quality of the pictures, and the quality of the ideas–not merely the difficulty of creating it.

If it were more difficult to design than to illustrate, would you lament the corrosive effect on our creative community, pointing out how we reward illustrators rather than designers? Design, you might argue, requires much thought and care, while illustrations can be quickly produced by any unskilled hack. Such arguments do not show any inherent superiority of design over illustrations, or vice versa, but simply point out the relative ease or difficulty of creation.

I read an article the other day about how people are scandalized to learn that actors in movies have been digitally altered in post-production.

In the “before” shot Jennifer Connolly [sic], the leading lady, was shown talking on her mobile phone. The digitally manipulated “after” shot showed her talking on her mobile phone with a tear rolling down her cheek. Such alterations are becoming increasingly common, but practitioners are discouraged from discussing this work.

“Acting is all about honesty, but something like this makes what you see on screen a dishonest moment,” said a leading technician. “Everyone feels a bit dirty about it.”

In my opinion, this is completely ridiculous. “Acting is all about honesty”?! Nonsense. Acting, and the theater, is all about telling a story. If Jennifer Connelly had been faking a tear, or had added a drop of water to her cheek, would that be any more “honest” than a bit of digital manipulation?

I can understand the outrage over digital manipulation in magazines or advertisements, where an airbrush or lighting tricks can paint a misleading picture of a skin cream or a shampoo. But movies are supposed to be about make-believe. They’re supposed to be about suspense of disbelief. I know that Christopher Reeve can’t really fly, that it’s all cinematic tricks. I know that the protagonist’s wife’s tragic death is a portrayal of the story, that the actress is really alive and healthy and the actor isn’t really married to her at all, and probably has no emotional connection with her whatsoever. But I suspend my disbelief in order to enjoy the story that the writer and director have engineered. The actors are mere puppets in the tale.

And I can certainly see how the actors would be more than a bit miffed at this. I can imagine those who could paint realistic pictures were miffed at the invention of the photograph. Nobody enjoys being made obsolete. But just as theater made the certain set of skills required for the stage obsolete, the ability to digitally alter video footage to an unprecedented degree may make the set of skills possessed by the current Hollywood status quo obsolete. So I don’t blame “actors such as Tom Cruise [who] have begun to write clauses into their contracts granting them full control of their own digital assets”. But in the end, it’s a losing battle. The kind of digital manipulation people find scandalous today will be commonplace ten years from now.

This may have serious ramifications on the traditional role we give celebrities. If a film is particularly moving or a performance compelling, we tend to honor the actor for their role. What if the actor becomes simply a model for their CGI character, with their actions and voice digitally created and/or enhanced? Who gets the credit for an amazing film or a lifelike portrayal of a character? What will happen to the Oscars? It will certainly be a different world!

Some don’t have “moral” issues with such retouching, but still “think that it makes it tough to consider films and photographs that have been doctored genuine art forms anymore.”[1] I think this is a bit ridiculous, too. As I’ve said before, art is not art because it is rare, or because it is difficult to create, or even because it is “honest”. Art is art because it touches our mind in a particular way which we enjoy. If a retouched film or photograph is inferior artistically to an “authentic” one, it is because of failures in the process, not because of something intrinisic to the process itself.

I hate watching movies with an abundance of CGI effects, but that is because they are instantly recognizable as CGI effects, and inferior aesthetically. The reason I preferred the look of Star Wars III-VI over I-III doesn’t have anything inherently to do with CGI—if the prequels had managed to digitally convey the same environment as the originals, I would have been just as happy. The problem was that they looked much more fake and contrived, from the digitally-inserted Jabba to the robot battle scenes on Naboo. It was aesthetics that made it inferior, not the fact that it happened to be fake. The original Jabba was fake too (a Jim Henson puppet), but he looked real.

Actors will have to get used to the fact that their role may be changing. Audiences should already be aware that everything presented to them for consumption is heavily altered, be it with camera lenses, trick angles, splicing together multiple shots, or digital trickery. Adding a digital teardrop isn’t some new and scandalous travesty—it’s the same fakery that Hollywood has used for decades, only now in a computerized form. That’s not going to change, but hopefully our awareness of it will.

Lately at work I’ve been tuning in to an online “radio station” called last.fm. The gist of it is this: you type in a name of a popular artist that you like (say, Barenaked Ladies or They Might Be Giants) and they play music from similar-sounding artists. Just like radio, it’s a great way to discover new music once you’re tired of your same old playlist over and over again.

The great thing is that because last.fm is licensed as a radio station (since they just stream music and don’t actually allow you to say, “Play me this song”), they can legally use music from just about every artist under the sun, from the Beatles to Madonna to Matchbox 20 to Dalida. It’s awesome.

Everything’s not perfect, though. Their Flash plugin (that plays the music) hiccups under Linux, and I can’t get their Linux client to run on my relatively up-to-date Fedora box, so I’m limited to listening at work only (where I’m saddled with a Windows laptop that does nothing but check email all day). Also, it seems like they could do so much more than just play me songs that are similar to a single artist. Why can’t I put in the names of dozens of artists that I like, and last.fm uses all of them to make recommendations? And when I come across a new artist that I particularly like, it could use that to make even further recommendations.

Well, actually, I think last.fm can do at least some of what I’ve described, but not via the Flash plugin player where, as far as I can tell, I’m limited to a single artist “station” (I spent most of my time today listening to the “Sounds like Fairouz” station). I think you have to download their special client in order to get the cooler features. But, unfortunately, it won’t run without admin permissions on my Windows laptop (stupid Windows), and as I already mentioned, I can’t get the Linux client to install properly on FC5.

Oh well. It may not be the “Social Music Revolution” just yet, but at least it gives me something pleasant to listen to while cranking out code (and lets me discover new artists I like too). Why not give it a shot yourself?

Recently, Steve Jobs wrote an Open Letter on Music and DRM. The gist of his letter was that DRM doesn’t work, and that the music companies should abandon it and let Apple and other companies sell music that will work on any mp3 player, not just iPods. The CEO of Macrovision, a company dedicated to providing DRM, recently wrote this response. Here’s my take on Amoroso’s letter.

We have been involved with and have supported both prevention technologies and DRM that are on literally billions of copies of music, movies, games, software and other content forms, as well as hundreds of millions of devices across the world.

Never once has any of Macrovision’s products managed to keep digital content from appearing without DRM on the Internet. The fact of the matter is that DRM simply doesn’t work. It depends on a fundamentally broken pattern of giving the user the cryptographic keys required to unlock the content you’re trying to prevent them from unlocking. As Steve Jobs puts it, “one must still “hide” the keys which unlock the music on the user’s computer or portable music player.”

the fact is that DRM also has a broad impact across many different forms of content and across many media devices. Therefore, the discussion should not be limited to just music. It is critical that as all forms of content move from physical to electronic there is an opportunity for DRM to be an important enabler across all content, including movies, games and software, as well as music.

Translation: if the music industry abandons DRM and discovers that life without it is great, then other industries may abandon DRM too, making our entire business model obsolete.

DRM increases not decreases consumer value –
I believe that most piracy occurs because the technology available today has not yet been widely deployed to make DRM-protected legitimate content as easily accessible and convenient as unprotected illegitimate content is to consumers. The solution is to accelerate the deployment of convenient DRM-protected distribution channels—not to abandon them. Without a reasonable, consistent and transparent DRM we will only delay consumers in receiving premium content in the home, in the way they want it. For example, DRM is uniquely suitable for metering usage rights, so that consumers who don’t want to own content, such as a movie, can “rent” it.

This is pure nonsense, mixed in with a little bit of fact. I’ll accept the idea that DRM is a useful way of “renting” content. But it does not follow that movies or music that you buy should be DRM-encumbered. It does absolutely nothing to prevent Internet piracy, but does a lot to prevent legitimate uses of the content that are protected by Fair Use provisions in copyright law.

Similarly, consumers who want to consume content on only a single device can pay less than those who want to use it across all of their entertainment areas – vacation homes, cars, different devices and remotely. Abandoning DRM now will unnecessarily doom all consumers to a “one size fits all” situation that will increase costs for many of them.

Translation: abandoning DRM will remove our ability to charge people multiple times for music and movies that they’ve already payed for.

Copyright law (and common sense) already dictates that once a person has purchased a copy of a song, or a movie, or a book, they are free to “format-shift” and use that same copy “across all entertainment areas”. They legally don’t have to purchase it multiple times. So the “one size fits all” situation is mandated by law, and will decrease costs for most people.

DRM will increase electronic distribution –
Well maintained and reasonably implemented DRM will increase the electronic distribution of content, not decrease it. In this sense, DRM is an important ingredient in the overall success of the emerging digital world and especially cannot be overlooked for content creators and owners in the video industry. Quite simply, if the owners of high-value video entertainment are asked to enter, or stay in a digital world that is free of DRM, without protection for their content, then there will be no reason for them to enter, or to stay if they’ve already entered. The risk will be too great.

Bollocks. Given the choice between making some money without DRM, and making no money by not publishing at all, “owners of high-value video entertainment” will inevitably choose the former. But given the opportunity to use DRM to remove Fair Use provisions and charge people multiple times for the same content, content owners will frequently choose the latter, no matter what it costs the legitimate user. This is no surprise. But to paint DRM as a win for the “consumer” is simply dishonest.

DRM needs to be interoperable and open –
I agree with you that there are difficult challenges associated with maintaining the controls of an interoperable DRM system, but it should not stop the industry from pursuing it as a goal. Truly interoperable DRM will hasten the shift to the electronic distribution of content and make it easier for consumers to manage and share content in the home – and it will enable it in an open environment where their content is portable across a number of devices, not held hostage to just one company’s products.

Translation: we don’t want DRM to be controlled by other companies. However, we would be more than happy if this “truly interoperable DRM” were completely owned and patented by Macrovision.

The fact of the matter is that DRM cannot be “open”. The secrets must be kept secret, which is a nigh-impossible task even if a single company controls all the secrets (simply because the secrets must also be on the users’ devices). “Interoperable DRM” is a contradiction in terms.

At Macrovision we are willing to lead this industry effort. We offer to assist Apple in the issues and problems with DRM that you state in your letter. Should you desire, we would also assume responsibility for FairPlay as a part of our evolving DRM offering and enable it to interoperate across other DRMs, thus increasing consumer choice and driving commonality across devices.

This is ridiculous. “Assuming responsibility for FairPlay” means nothing to Apple when FairPlay is inevitably cracked as a result of Macrovision taking control. Apple loses its bargaining chip with the record companies, the record companies lose their one DRM stack (Apple, iTunes Music Store, iPod) that actually works relatively well, and the only winners in this game are Macrovision.

With such an enjoyable and revolutionary experience within our grasp, we should not minimize the role that DRM can and should play in enabling the transition to electronic content distribution. Without reasonable, consistent and transparent DRM we will only delay the availability of premium content in the home. As an industry, we should not let that happen.

Reasonable, consistent, and transparent DRM is an impossible pipe dream. Telling content producers and content owners to wait to license their content until this pipe dream is available will only delay the availability of premium content in the home. We, as an industry, and as the people who support that industry, should not let that happen.

Happy Valentine’s Day! Especially to my dear friend QuarkXPress. Oh how I love thee! Let me count the ways…

Just this morning I was struggling with OpenOffice, trying to get a relatively simple document laid out properly. It was a nightmare! The biggest problem is trying to get pictures in your document to work properly. There’s pretty much no easy way to just plop an image box in the middle of your page that you can position absolutely on the page. Furthermore, I was trying to get horizontal rules to show up between certain paragraphs, and then suddenly it wouldn’t let me delete the horizontal rules any more! I fought with OpenOffice for about two hours until I finally gave up. “When I get home, I’ll do this in Quark and be a much happier man.”

And I was right. In between periods of the Vancouver/Minnesota hockey game, I was able to put together an awesome-looking layout in a fraction of the time it took me to consign OpenOffice to the trash bin of layout programs. Thanks, Quark! Once again you have saved the day.